Religion is a poor source of morality

[robvalue]

No, I'm not. Social Darwinism is insane, and anyone who thinks it's a good idea is insane. That's a value judgement by me, of course. I'm not the arbiter of who is and isn't sane, or what value system is "the best".

How could anyone get social Darwinism from my arguments? I'm explicitly saying no value system is objectively correct. So how can I be arguing for an individual one? I've even said my own value system isn't objectively better than anyone elses.

Wow, I am exhausted after writing all that shit. I gotta go kill some weak and diseased people, laters!

PS: Wait, now I get it. Because I'm describing scientifically how morality came about in the first place, that means I'm saying that I advocate trying to "help evolution" as a value system. Of course not. It's just the facts of the matter. It's no use pretending it's not.

PPS: I'm getting way too obsessed with this forum again! I'm gonna take a break for a few days, anyone else is welcome to pick up this debate for me If not I'll see where it's at when I get back. Peace out Roadrunner

[Mudhammam]

Just to clarify what the theists in this thread are suggesting: morality cannot be objective unless we imagine a God who, for some nations at some epochs, endorses the beating of slaves and stoning of fornicators, but at other times does not. In other words, their source for what they want to call objective morality is actually depressingly relative; depressing because it appears to trick some minds into defending barbarism as very good.

Well, to hell with that. The very notion that God cannot lie suggests that God as he exists in his actions can be abstracted from the nature of the Good, i.e. the standard, which you unjustifiably assert as being synonymous with his "nature" - a standard (or nature), by the way, which he apparently lacks the free will to oppose.

Objective morality doesn't require God as a source. It requires inquiring minds who experience different states of being in their struggle to attain what every person desires: happiness.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Robvalue, why do you privilege empathy in your just-so story about natural selection. What about disgust, contempt, and fear. No doubt our capacity for those also evolved to confer some reproductive advantage. Using your logic I could rationalize moral sentiments I'm sure you would find disturbing. For example, disgust prompts us to avoid behaviors that led to injury and disease. Therefore it is moral to shun the sick and refrain from formication. Members of the tribe that are not inclined by normative desires to reproduce should be held in contempt. Or fear of outsiders protects the gene pool of the tribe therefore strangers, particularly those that appear different should be destroyed.

My point is not that any of the above examples are true but rather that contrary to common AF opinion the pressures of natural selection are at best neutral with respect to the origin of moral values.

We definitely have a strong feeling of "in-group" versus "out-group" (xenophobia, or fear of those who are different), but there are many examples of tribal peoples who're (or usually, were, since we've wiped so many out) still living in a way similar to that of our ancestors who had no problem with "non-reproductive" behaviors of that sort. It is quite possible for a non-reproductive member of a tribe to find a role that is helpful to the overall success of the tribe. Rather than listing examples, I will point you to a term to Google: "third gender".

Our concepts of fear and disgust for those who are radically outside the tribal norm is certainly a competitive advantage, and thus evoluationarily favored, but it is a non-sequitur to suspect that the tribe is automatically going to pick sexual preferences as one of those things to consider as a factor for in-vs-out-group identification.

However, we do tend to find that in a particular set of conditions, homophobia tends to emerge. Warrior-tribe people, especially in harsh environments with few resources and much competition, tend to push for a "breeder" mindset that encourages very particular patterns of family identity (including Patriarchy) which encourage large numbers of children for the next generation of spear-carriers. In places where tribes are not so dense and resources are more plentiful (e.g. rainforests), you tend to see more egalitarian societies and less issue with the idea of sexual identity. Of course, the three major religions on earth (Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism) all evolved out of warrior societies, and tend to promote a strong line of definition for gender roles as inherent in the "in-group" definition.

It's important to realize this for what it is, and not confuse it with an instinctive disgust for homosexuality or other "deviance". We are taught to think of those things the way we do, whether we realize how much influence those teachings have on our instincts toward xenophobia. There are many factors which limit our capacity for empathy, and I think a mark of civilized (or "evolved", if you prefer) intelligence in humanity is the capacity to recognize those limits and the source of those xenophobic ideas, and to choose to overlook them and "learn better". 

To put it another way, while xenophobia is a natural instinct that evolved, the fact that people here in SE Missouri tend to hate black people is not based on a natural revulsion to dark skin, but to social training that they absorb from a very young age, here in Klan country.

[Neo-Scholastic]

But again that is all speculation on your part. I could also say that empathy is a reproductive disadvantage leaving compassionate people vulnerable to hostile groups. It is premature to say with any confidence that any particular evolved trait is primary for moral behavior and I believe there is good reason not to consider natural instinct a reliable moral guide. Virtuous action is often contrary to our natural instinct, like showing courage in the face of danger. You seemed to dismiss revulsion of deviate behavior as socially constructed problems. Could we not also say that social constructs like a sense of duty and honor contribute positively. Again socialization is neutral without reference to a higher standard of value that instinct or cultural norms.

[Edwardo Piet]

Objective morality doesn't require God as a source. It requires inquiring minds who experience different states of being in their struggle to attain what every person desires: happiness.

I wonder if you like Sam Harris as much as I do. He's awesome.

[Mudhammam]

Objective morality doesn't require God as a source. It requires inquiring minds who experience different states of being in their struggle to attain what every person desires: happiness.

I wonder if you like Sam Harris as much as I do. He's awesome.

Haha, I do like Sam... so long as he isn't talking about U.S. foreign policy or Israel/Palestine though. ;-)

[TheRocketSurgeon]

But again that is all speculation on your part. I could also say that empathy is a reproductive disadvantage leaving compassionate people vulnerable to hostile groups. It is premature to say with any confidence that any particular evolved trait is primary for moral behavior and I believe there is good reason not to consider natural instinct a reliable moral guide. Virtuous action is often contrary to our natural instinct, like showing courage in the face of danger. You seemed to dismiss revulsion of deviate behavior as socially constructed problems. Could we not also say that social constructs like a sense of duty and honor contribute positively. Again socialization is neutral without reference to a higher standard of value that instinct or cultural norms.

I say this with all the respect I can muster: You appear to have completely  missed the point of what I was saying. So I'll try to do better at explaining. We evolved as small tribes of hunter-gatherers, at maximum 200 in size (we know this figure because that's the most that we can observe in still-extant H-G groups, wherever civilization hasn't finished exterminating them), and our ideas about in-group/out-group and empathy and socialization are built around this sized group's social complexity level. I will explain more, below.

However, you did raise a couple of valid objections, ones which have been met with a plethora of research and writing, and which I can understand are ideas easily misunderstood, and I will also address that. You are quite right that this is a relatively new field and that much more research needs to be done on the subject. Unfortunately, people will commonly say that if we don't know everything then we don't know anything, and that's simply not true.

Concept 1: "Empathy is a reproductive disadvantage leaving compassionate people vulnerable to hostile groups"

You're still thinking in terms of the individual against a large society. This is common to American thinking (not knocking you for it, just a fact; I too am susceptible to this line of thinking), but I'm talking about 30,000 years ago, or 150,000 years ago, generation after generation of selection for suitability to a 100-200 person tribal group. The only "hostile groups" would have been other tribes who cared nothing for this  tribe's individuals or social/moral structure. However, empathy toward one's own group would convey a massive advantage on that group, even sometimes over the individual fitness of that person to reproduce; I've described kin selection to you before, but in case you've forgotten, here's a link. The evolutionary psychology version is here, explaining altruism's evolution.

Concept 2: "It is premature to say with any confidence that any particular evolved trait is primary for moral behavior" 

I'm honestly not sure what you mean by this, exactly. Most of our behavioral traits are governed by a large number of (often competing) centers of the brain, instinctive and imprinted/accultured. We have a pretty good idea of the basis for empathy and social group operation; the problem is whose definition of "moral" we're using, since you're working from one particular social-set, and I must use the term much more broadly, such as when I say that moral behavior has been observed in animals. But let's stick to humans. We know that moral behavior is specifically tied to particular sections of the brain which, when damaged, impair moral judgment but little else. The "new synthesis" in evolutionary psychology is putting together a picture which includes the following ideas:

People are selfish, yet morally motivated. Morality is universal, yet culturally variable. Such apparent contradictions are dissolving as research from many disciplines converges on a few shared principles, including the importance of moral intuitions, the socially functional (rather than truth-seeking) nature of moral thinking, and the coevolution of moral minds with cultural practices and institutions that create diverse moral communities. I propose a fourth principle to guide future research: Morality is about more than harm and fairness. More research is needed on the collective and religious parts of the moral domain, such as loyalty, authority, and spiritual purity.

The long abstract is a bit more detailed, but you need a subscription to Science  to read the full article.

---

J. Haidt suggested in a recent Review in Science (18 May 2007, p. 998) that future research on moral cognition should offer views that go beyond the sole principles of harm and fairness. In agreement with this view we propose that commonly used moral dilemmas (2–4) should be considered with respect to major stages in the evolution of human behavior.

The most primitive behavior of a single individual involves decisions motivated by ensuring his own survival. During the Pleistocene, life in small groups resulted in genetic changes influenced by culture (culture/gene co-evolution,) that led to the emergence of social instincts favoring kin or the welfare of tribe members. Finally, over the past 10,000 years, social evolution resulted in culturally shaped rules that took advantage of a psychology that had evolved to cooperate with in-group members and so expanded the benefits of social instincts to larger/anonymous social systems. At the neurobiological level, this improvement of social norms likely necessitated an adaptation of conscious/rational cerebral processes to drive functional adjustment and novel coordination with more automatic intuitive/affective mechanisms. The study of these neurobiological substrates could benefit from consideration of the evolutionary stages to better accommodate behavioral decisions according to which social group they may benefit or harm. We argue for a psychological model of decisionmaking in moral dilemmas where three neural mechanisms coexist: one very primitive that mostly favors self-interest; another more automatic intuitive/affective favoring welfare of kin/in-group members; and a third conscious/rational mechanism implementing norms that favor large groups. Consequently, moral dilemmas could be sorted according to the kind of benefit they address. Such clear-cut distinctions remain theoretical in nature since, in real-life, contextual influences have a crucial role in triggering feelings that can have a critical impact on moral judgments (e.g., empathy). However, in our opinion, this framework would help refine experimental paradigms and analyses when subtle social contextual information changes are at stake in moral and economic dilemmas.

(Emphasis mine, of course.)

---

Concept 3: "I believe there is good reason not to consider natural instinct a reliable moral guide."

Yet you just tried to cite to your personal revulsion (or the common revulsion) as a moral guide. I agree with you that natural instincts are a terrible moral guide. That's why I mentioned culture and civilization. The mark of culture and civilization is an attempt to rise above our natures... however, it should be noted that part of our nature is to build cultures and establish collective moral rules of varying kinds (with some obvious ones in common, like "murder = bad").

Concept 4: "Virtuous action is often contrary to our natural instinct, like showing courage in the face of danger. You seemed to dismiss revulsion of deviate behavior as socially constructed problems. Could we not also say that social constructs like a sense of duty and honor contribute positively. Again socialization is neutral without reference to a higher standard of value that instinct or cultural norms."

I suggest you spend some time really thinking about the concept of a small group setting, and what the above researchers wrote about the three-tiered morality centers of the brain. It is precisely our evolved ability to function as a social group (tribe), showing bravery in defense of the tribe, honor in our dealings with our group, etc., which "contributed positively" enough to make us into humans! 

Similarly, revulsion toward "deviate behavior" takes on many, many guises in many cultures, and I was trying to get you to see that your particular set of revulsions is particular to your inherited culture (and tends to arise in those with high levels of inter-tribal warfare, like ancient Israel, Rome, and the Mideast). I know what you think you mean, when you say "higher standard of value", but I think it's clear that even those holy books are based on the cultures that spawned them, as a way of legitimizing a particular set of values.

[Neo-Scholastic]

I say this with all the respect I can muster: You appear to have completely missed the point of what I was saying.

I appreciate your goodwill. I like you. You raise good points and seem pretty thoughtful overall. If I misunderstood then the fault is all mine for not reading carefully enough. You’ve made a couple statements about me here and elsewhere that I truly believe were unwarranted. For quite some time, I’ve been very careful to qualify all my statements about atheism and atheists numerically with “a few” or “some” or many. I have also been very careful for well over a year to not equate atheism per se with ontological naturalism, physical monism, materialism, etc. And despite all this you seem to think I am making wide sweeping generalizations from “the hate in my heart.” As for this thread, I guess I could go point by point, but in this case I don’t believe it would be necessary or productive.

Put simply, your naturalistic position makes a circular argument. You cannot evaluate the efficacy with which moral reasoning makes correct value judgments without first assuming the efficacy of moral reasoning. That’s what I mean when I say that naturalist theories of morality unjustifiably ‘privilege’ some instincts (empathy, disgust, altruism, group cohesion, etc.) over others.

The research you cite insightfully identifies external influences (culture and experience) and innate processes that contribute to the process of moral reasoning. I do not dispute any of their conclusions. But, and it is a critical ‘but’, empirical data alone cannot show that the results of moral reasoning are in fact moral. For example, scientific research can show that sociopaths reason differently from regular folks. Scientific research apart from a pre-determined measurable moral standard cannot show that the value judgments of a sociopath are morally inferior, equal, or superior to those of regular folks. From a naturalistic perspective, the best anyone can do is say that the behavior of a sociopath deviates from the cultural norm.

Secondly, it is premature to say that specific social systems are more fit than others. As for now, scientific research is too incomplete to say if the moral framework of one culture is superior to another in terms of ‘fitness’. It’s all speculation. Human societies have been organized under tribal elders and warlords, dynasties, dictators, empires, communes, and nation states. Western constitutional republics and liberal democracies have only been around for a tiny sliver of human history. There is insufficient data to suppose that Western-style approaches to governance are any more likely to insure the long-term survival of humanity than Islamic Caliphates or stone-age tribalism.

[houseofcantor]

I say this with all the respect I can muster: You appear to have completely  missed the point of what I was saying.

I appreciate your goodwill. I like you.

I think both of you are pretty cool.


I had a point but it's tear stained. OK, I'm better now, continue.

[Neo-Scholastic]

I know what you think you mean, when you say "higher standard of value", but I think it's clear that even those holy books are based on the cultures that spawned them, as a way of legitimizing a particular set of values.

I was not thinking of holy books or any other form of special revelation. As a professing Christian I understand why you would make that assumption, so I forgive you. The higher standard of value of which I was thinking has something to do with recognizing the degree to which a thing conforms to its essential nature. This approach at least has the promise of achieving a measure of objectivity.